Many customers have security requirements mandating the use of https.  There is no way within the management console of the Enterprise Layer Manager to force https, so Engineering has approved this as the officially supported method to configure the appliance to be https-only.

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Instructions

1. SSH into the ELM as root.
2. In a text editor, edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
3. Find the line:  Listen 80
4. Normally that's the second line in the file.  Change it to:  Listen 127.0.0.1:80
5. Save and exit the text editor.
6. Run: service httpd restart

This will stop the ELM from listening to external connections on port 80, effectively forcing https, but does not redirect http to https.  That means the ELM simply won't respond on http / port 80, which could lead an uninformed user to think the ELM was down or they had the wrong IP address for it. 

Note: This also disable access to the ELM via layering.cloud.com, and forces connections to the Management Console to go directly to the ELM.

It is also possible to redirect HTTP to HTTPS automatically rather than disabling HTTP.  However, this is more complicated, so our official stance is that you should just disable HTTP as above.  However, you can edit httpd.conf as above and instead of changing the Listen line, add these above the Listen line.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>

How to block HTTP access to the ELM, thereby forcing HTTPS.